Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I suspect that almost none of this adversarial approach - the Minister says he is trying to avoid it, but this amounts to an adversarial approach of putting pressure on the applicants to meet particular timeframes for further information - would be necessary if he did not have the arbitrary six-month exclusion. Why send someone back for more information? Why refuse his or her application? It would be because the deciding officer felt that the applicant had not reached the threshold of six months or needed to do something to prove he or she had. The fact that, from the start, the Government has been trying to exclude people for reasons the Minister still has not explained despite repeated requests means that we will end up in an adversarial approach where we require the survivors to get information and then deem their applications to be withdrawn if they do not revert within certain timeframes as against an open-ended period for the State to process and make decisions on applications.

This redress scheme and legislation were supposed to be about the survivors and redress and an acknowledgement of those who had suffered. Instead, those who went through the mother and baby homes, those who suffered forced separations and those who were done a great wrong by the church and State will be put under pressure to either provide information or to have their applications deemed withdrawn. Is that not perverse? Is that not completely upside down and the wrong way around? The State can take as long as it likes, but the applicant – the survivor – may be required to prove himself or herself according to these arbitrary, unjust, inhumane, insulting and exclusionary criteria that the Government has devised.

The Government cannot even show enough respect for those sitting in the Gallery, those who are watching and have written to every Deputy and presumably every Government Minister asking why. Every single time, certainly in the debates I have participated in, the Minister has been asked and he will respond to technical questions around specific amendments but he will not answer that question and the Taoiseach would not answer it today either. I believe at this last minute the Minister should do the right thing and accept that if all of the survivors are saying it is wrong, unjust, cruel and insulting, he should just put up his hands and say "we got it wrong". It is not too late. This legislation can be adjourned. It was adjourned from two weeks ago and it can be adjourned again. The Government can come back with amended legislation that removes these arbitrary, unjust, cruel, inhumane and insulting exclusions. I appeal to the Minister to do that. If he is not going to, for God's sake he should at least give somebody an explanation as to how he possibly came to this perverse decision. There is no other way to describe it. He might at least give us the respect of providing the rationale that informed this decision, or perhaps he cannot because there is none.

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